Arditti Quartet

Tuesday 24 May 2005 07.00 EDT
First published on Tuesday 24 May 2005 07.00 EDT

In the Arditti Quartet's concert of new and recent string quartets, the four players were transformed from a group of actors to an impassioned debating society, and finally to visionary, astral travellers.

Elliott Carter's Fifth String Quartet is inspired by the processes of rehearsal. The piece is made up of individual fragments, such as a sensuous viola melody or a violent cello solo, which are taken up or rejected by the rest of the ensemble.

Led by Irvine Arditti, the players revealed the variety of Carter's music, from luminous stillness to hyperactive energy. What was miraculous at the end of the piece was the sense that the music had completed a musical journey, but its drama remained unresolved. After a playful pizzicato passage, it ended with the musical question marks of a fragile viola melody and an ambiguous violin chord.

There was nothing open-ended about Hanspeter Kyburz's String Quartet. For all the diversity of its ideas, which lurched from scherzo-like rhythms one moment to serene stasis the next, the piece created a structure that was both satisfyingly complete and shatteringly intense. Propelled by a dizzying solo from violinist Graeme Jennings, it careered towards a furious climax and a transcendent coda. There was a sense of a musical argument brilliantly achieved and resolved.

Jonathan Harvey's Fourth Quartet defined a different kind of transcendence, making the players soar on a magic carpet of sound. Harvey's electronic transformations produced a strange musical alchemy, turning tiny sounds - such as the shush of bows brushing the surfaces of the instruments - into vivid material.

The music created a continuum between grainy acoustic sounds and voluptuous, electronic swoops and slides, and the end of the piece fused both sonic worlds together: the Ardittis' ethereal musical lines were supported by a counterpoint of dazzling electronic noises, creating a blinding sonic brightness.